When OY peer into the future, they see something utterly unique: a world of billowy, technicolor ur-humans, living in a state of low-gravity euphoria. It's a world, more broadly, in which humans have finally stepped off the hamster wheel of history, breaking the cycle of ugliness and starting fresh on a new planet. It's a vision of a place the Berlin-based experimental duo calls Space Diaspora - which also happens to be the title of their new record.One could argue that the record's themes - of liberation from injustice and violence via the limitless freedom of outer space - shares a common thread with music and art created here in the United States, as well as in Africa. In fact, the duo says they are often compared to the founding artists of the Afrofuturist movement, which looks to the future from a black perspective and has contemporary expressions all over the world - though they don't necessarily identify with it.
OY collaborated with Berlin-based Zeitguesed to created the video for A New Planet is Born. Still from A New Planet.
It's more from the outside that people come up looking for links to Sun Ra and P-Funk, says Llelujah-ha, who makes up half the group. But [ Space Diaspora'] has a different meaning - [those artists] felt like aliens, and they took that idea further.
If Afrofuturism sprung from a stark sense of alienation, OY's outlook presents something of a counterpoint - a vision suffused with both humor and utopian optimism that humans can transcend their troubles and their differences.
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OY - A New Planet Is Born
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OY was started by Joy Frempong, who grew up in Ghana and Switzerland. The group is now a two-piece that also features Lleluja-ha, who disguises himself in a colorful, mantis-like headdress that obscures his face. Each OY album has traditionally grown out of a single theme. The last record, Kokokyinaka, was assembled from field recordings taken by Frempong in Africa that were pitched and sequenced to create music. The album also related folktales she picked up on the same trip across the continent, creating an album that functioned as both a diary of her travels and an inventive piece of journalism.
Space Diaspora takes Kokokyinaka 's border-shaking concerns to another plane, pushing beyond the Earth's gravitational pull.
In general, the idea was to play around with what could be beyond us, says Frempong. How could this world transcend itself - how could there be new patterns?
Frempong and Lleluja-ha - who prefers to be known only by his pseudonym - came upon the idea of a future in which the recurring loops of human behavior - incessant wars, endless political disputes, even art movements - finally cycled past themselves. ( The past overtook the future, recites Frempong on the track The Story of Space Diaspora. A grand implosion which led creatures of all shapes, colors, and continents to be transported to a new time and era. )
It's more of a playful idea, actually, says Frempong. It's about these loops that keep repeating faster and faster - the idea was, what's the maximum of loops? What's the quickest we can get, when the past overtakes the future? Perhaps that's the solution - thats when something new can finally happen.
The realistic-looking creatures are entirely computer generated. Still from OYs A New Planet.
The sound of the record itself was derived from that idea. It's an experimental record, but not avant garde per se - its topical concerns might be out-there, but its sounds are distinctly friendly on the ears, a combination of warm synths and vocal samples both spacey and soft, like flowing pastel clouds inside a nebula. Tracks like We We We We and Space Diaspora in particular use layered vocal tracks to create a kind of pillowy soundscape.
It was an effort, the band says, to imagine which sounds would be left after human beings finally left behind their native world. (It's this sense that gives the diaspora part of the record's title its meaning - and its particular resonance in 2016.) Which sounds would be left, and which would remain? explains Llelujah-ha. It would probably be a human voice - or just voices in general - even though they might be digitalized or transformed.
Both members say they wanted to look to the future with more of an element of humor, as opposed to the dystopian outlook to which forward-looking artists often turn. When asked about her influences, she doesn't mention astral jazz or funkadelic R&B but, instead, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which she cites for its creativity, imagination, and sense of humor.
The video for A New Planet is Born is itself an expression of this wry outlook. The figures in the video are presumably aliens, or some kind of evolved humans, but they look approachable, even huggable - like mushrooms entities, or technicolor Teletubbies made of out of colorful fabric.
Frempong says the concept of A New Planet is Born is based on a future in which humans finally transcend their ugliest tendencies. Still from A New Planet.
It may be that OY's music does in fact fit comfortably under the umbrella of Afrofuturism - an umbrella that has grown substantially since the spacey explorations of Sun Ra and the mothership fantasies of George Clinton and P-Funk. It's a shifting movement whose broad contours envelop all sorts of movements. As critics like Greg Tate and Kodwo Eshun have elaborated, Afrofuturism reflects concerns that arise with the passage of time, keeping as its common element the ways in which black communities have felt these changes.
OY's vision, for instance, is one that feels particularly relevan
